Cooperative Production

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Collective production is a system in which something is producedcollectively. In an agricultural society as well as in society at large there aresome commodities which are produced collectively. For example, sugar cane farmers in India collectively produce raw sugar from sugar canegrown in their individual fields. They collectively purchase a large vat inwhich they boil the juice of the sugar cane for the preparation of rawsugar.--Shrii Sarkar

By Shrii Prabhat R Sarkar The commune system is also a kind of collective production in that peopleproduce something in a collective manner. Cooperative industrial and agriculturalproduction belongs to the same category. Agricultural production by privateenterprise is not collective production, neither is agricultural production by thesharecropping system.Of the different systems of production the cooperative system, private

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enterprise, the sharecropping system and the commune system the last one is

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the worst. The sharecropping system is slightly better than the commune system,and better still is private enterprise, but the best system is the cooperativesystem of production.In the commune system individual ownership is denied. In some countries theright of individual ownership may be accepted in principle but not in practice. Insuch places there is no scope for workers to get either the inspiration or theincentive to fully utilize their skills in either agriculture or industry. There is noopportunity for them to enhance their working capacity. They are like oxenmoving around an oil grinding mill with their eyes blindfolded. The oxen maymove one hundred miles a day but they make no forward progress. Similarly, theworkers in the commune system are confined within the four walls of intellectualstaticity. They have no opportunity to develop subtle thoughts, so their lives cannever be elevated to higher strata. People living in the commune system are likeanimals trapped within the vortex of staticity till the last breath of their lives. Theyhave no psychological or human relation with their work. This is the nature of thecommune system. The whole system runs counter to human psychology, andconsequently production never increases.Those countries which have adopted the commune system directly or indirectlyhave utterly failed in agricultural production. This is a most unfortunate fact.Capitalist countries, where agricultural production takes place on the basis of individual ownership, supply food grains to communist countries. Communistcountries are compelled to purchase their minimum requirements from countriesunder private enterprise. The poor masses live a miserable existence of hunger

and deprivation, and their lives are nothing but a bad dream. Though thecapitalist system is bad, even then the commune system surrenders to it. What apitiful situation this is. Until communist countries reject the commune system theywill not be able to solve their food problems, and they will continue to move fromcountry to country with their begging bowls outstretched.The sharecropping system is better than the commune system because peopleget more incentive and freedom. In this system the psychology of If I can

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produce more I can earn more dominates. But this system also suffers from

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some major defects. Suppose a sharecropper manages to get seven acres of land from three different landowners and thus arranges twenty-one acres of land.He may not cultivate the total acreage due to idleness, want of sufficientlabourers or financial constraints. He may think that limited cultivation will provideenough food to meet the demands of his family for a whole year, so he does notbother cultivating the remainder of the land. As a result the owner of the landuncultivated by the sharecropper will be deprived of his share.The second negative aspect of the sharecropping system is that sharecroppersoften hold more land than an individual landowner. As a result somesharecroppers have a higher standard of living than landowners. This kind of sharecropper cannot claim that he works in the fields with his own physicallabour. In a round about way such a system encourages capitalism in agriculture.The third defect of this system lies in the fact that sharecroppers employ hiredlabourers to work the land, and remain idle themselves.The fourth defect is that landowners holding very small amounts of land cannotcultivate their land independently because their capacity is limited. Only asharecropper can cultivate such small plots. Consequently, a new feudalism iscreated out of the sharecropping system, is this not so?Another serious defect of the sharecropping system is that in India the owner of afew acres of land is brought under the land ceiling acts whereas thesharecropper, even though he may cultivate a much larger area of land, does notcome within the scope of the land ceiling laws at all. He can openly challengethese laws and say that as he is not the actual owner of the land, why should hebe served a land ceiling order. Thus, a section of the landholding capitalists whoare big sharecroppers escape through the holes in the nylon dragnet of the law.Individual agricultural production and the sharecropping system both suffer fromanother major problem. If farmers in these two systems do not have enoughcapital but have a large area of land, they cannot adopt modern agriculturalmethods for production. Tractors and power tillers remain beyond their means.By using age-old ploughing techniques these farmers can only cultivate thesurface of the land, and this does not help increase its productivity. They cannotutilize better quality fertilizers, high yielding seeds and proper irrigation systems.

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